1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the usage of computer services. More specifically, the present invention relates to methods, systems and computer program products for tracking a client's usage of one or more services provided by one or more servers.
2. Background and Related Art
With the exception of certain educational institutions and governmental entities, most access to the Internet is indirect. That is, rather than being directly connected to the Internet, most access the Internet through some intermediary, known as an Internet Service Provider or ISP. An ISP may provide various levels of service depending on the particular needs of its customers. For example, individual customers may access the Internet through a dialup telephone line, a broadband cable, or perhaps a broadband wireless connection. Many individual customers typically share an ISP's connection resources, at least to some extent. In contrast, business users often prefer a dedicated ISP connection with a fairly constant bandwidth.
An ISP may provide various “points of presence” for connecting to the Internet. Depending on the ISP, these points of presence may include local telephone numbers, toll or toll free telephone access numbers, cable systems, microwave stations, etc. Cable systems and microwave systems are local by nature, but it is generally a significant advantage for an ISP to offer local telephone access to keep costs as low as possible, both for the ISP and its customers.
Although the number of computers with Internet access has grown tremendously, competition among ISPs can be quite fierce. As a result, ISPs often employ various service plans with aggressive pricing strategies to attract consumers, including businesses and individuals alike. Most service plans fall into one of two broad categories: (i) unlimited access for a fixed fee, and (ii) a certain number of hours for a fixed fee, with additional hours being billed as used. In either case, an ISP server is traditionally responsible for tracking a client's usage, if necessary.
However, traditional tracking suffers from at least two significant problems. First, tracking each client connected to an ISP may impose a considerable processing burden on a server. This burden may be especially pronounced where an ISP has offered only unlimited access for a fixed fee, but would like to begin providing a reduced service level that requires usage tracking. In such a case, tracking may require upgrading to more powerful servers in order to avoid an overall performance reduction. Given the rather competitive nature of the ISP market, much of the benefit gained in offering a variety of service levels may be substantially offset by the corresponding increased costs and/or diminished capacity.
The second problem is at least somewhat related to the first. In some circumstances, it may be desirable to distinguish between various types of access. More particularly, an ISP may wish to charge for access to one type of service, whereas access to another type of service may be without charge. Tracking this level of detail at the ISP, as compared to simply tracking raw connection time, imposes yet further performance loads on the ISP's computing resources. Here again, the tradeoffs, in terms of benefits versus associated costs, may be undesirable or even prohibitive.
In contrast to an ISP's computer resources, a client's computing resources may be comparatively underutilized. Furthermore, the overhead associated with having an individual client track its own usage of services is likely to represent a much less significant performance problem for the client. Whereas server-based tracking concerns the usage of each and every connected client, client-based tracking concerns the usage of an individual client, or perhaps a cluster of clients. As such, client-based tracking allows a substantial portion of the processing load to be borne by the client. While some type of centralized server tracking component may be useful in receiving and correlating usage information from individual clients, the server computer resources for implementing client-based tracking are likely to be significantly less than would be required in a comparable, substantially server-based, tracking implementation. Therefore, methods, systems and computer program products for tracking a client's usage of server services are desired.